Street Photo Diary Issue 39 - Lost and Found Edition

Back in May of this year, I had gone out to shoot an episode of the Street Photo Diary video series. I shot the stills, and I even had the go-pro attached to record the camera’s point of view, but something came up so I never got to record the accompanying pieces to camera and so never finished the video. As a result, I never did anything with the photos from that day, and they kind of got lost among other projects and I forgot about them, until today when I found them again.

I was walking through Dublin in May, and it was still pretty cold for that time of the year, yet there were lots and lots of tourists around and tour groups, and that seemed to be the focus of my camera. Sometimes when I’m out shooting street photography, I will go out with a theme in mind. Other times, it will just sort of happen organically. In this case, I seemed to gravitate towards catching the expressions of people enjoying their visit to Ireland, and the occasional local who got caught up in the mix too.

I am actually fascinated by how other people view my home town, and when shooting street photography here I try to capture that. I often approach photographing the city by pretending I was a tourist, or as if I was doing travel photography, only at home. This is an attempt to see it differently, and while it's not always successful, that at least is the attempt. I love seeing tourists enjoying Irish hospitality, and it's great to see how multicultural our city has become, as when I was growing up, it was the complete opposite. It was a poor and struggling town, and fairly monocultural. It’s shocking to me that some people don’t like that it has become much more open and outward-looking, but I guess that xenophobic sentiment is unfortunately rampant everywhere now.

When I started writing this I didn’t intend it to be so philosophical! Anyway…

These were all shot on a Sony A6000 and a couple of different lenses. I used the Sigma 19mm and 30mm f/2.8 lenses and also the Sony 50mm f/1.8. The resulting images were processed in Lightroom, but I kept the processing to a minimum, so really just tweaking contrast and so on. I used the calibration technique from my Sony A6000 guide.